Measuring empowerment[1] on the from poverty to power blog: “breaking down the fuzzword ‘empowerment’, into the ‘four powers’ (power within; power with; power to and power over) model”…” you just can’t rock up in a village and ask do you feel empowered?’ and expect to get a useful result”

A new NBER working paper attempts to draw lessons from 115 impact evaluations of educational interventions in developing countries[7] (ungated version[8]): “One theme of the paper is that it has proven much easier to design policies to influence families’ school investment decisions, at least in the short run, than to design policies that increase educational quality.” This is a useful summary of a big literature, but like many such overviews, takes each study at face value, not being critical of how issues such as attrition, low power, strange implementation, and other such issues may caution us from viewing the results of some papers the same way as authors present them.